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  Article updated: November 29, 2023

Design visuals with Canva

Create eye-catching designs with Canva and simplify your content creation process. With Canva in Hootsuite, you can use templates made for social media and save time bringing your ideas to life.

Create a design in Canva

Create images and videos in Canva that grab your audience’s attention. Your posts can contain designs made in Canva, as well as images or video that you’ve uploaded or added from your media library.

  1. Start your post from Composer or Planner .
  2. In the Content area, select Design with Canva.
  3. Choose a template type. Templates help set the size and shape of your designs, but you can use most of them for any post. See Template dimensions later in this article.
  4. The first time you use Canva in Hootsuite, you’ll need to sign up for Canva (for free) or log in to an existing Canva account.
  5. In the Canva editor, create your designs! See Canva’s help center for instructions on designing in Canva.
    If you already have designs in your Canva account that you want to use, select More and then Folders to find them.

    Note: In a Free Canva account, Canva will prompt you to pay to use any elements that have criss-cross watermarks. If you don’t want to pay, choose a different element before trying to add your design to your post.

  6. When you’re finished, select Add to post.
    The Canva editor open in Composer, with the Add to post option highlighted.

When you create or update designs with Canva in Hootsuite, they are not saved to your Canva account. Closing Canva without selecting Add to post discards your design.

Point to a Canva image thumbnail and then select Alt to add alt text to it and make it more accessible. See Add alt text to images for more details.

Edit a Canva image or video

Only visuals created with Canva in Hootsuite can be edited in Canva. You can also edit Canva images in Hootsuite’s image editor, but once you do, you can no longer edit them in Canva.

  1. When composing a new post, or editing scheduled or draft content, point to an image or video thumbnail and then select Edit in Canva.
    If you don’t see this option, the image was either not created in Canva, or it was changed outside of Canva and can no longer be edited there.
    A cursor pointing to an image thumbnail in Composer, showing the Edit in Canva option.
  2. Edit the visual, and then select Add to post.

Template dimensions

The following table lists the dimensions of the Canva template types in Composer. Unless noted differently, you can publish any of these template sizes to any of your social accounts.

Learn about image and file requirements for each social network:

Canva templates and their dimensions
Template typeDimensions
Facebook Ad1200 px x 628 px
Facebook Post940 px x 788 px
Infographic800 px x 2000px (not compatible with Instagram direct publishing)
Instagram Post1080 px x 1080 px
Instagram Story1080 px x 1920 px
Social Media800 px x 800 px
Twitter Post1042 px x 512 px
VideosLandscape 1920 px x 1080 px
Portrait 1080 px x 1350 px
Square 1080 px x 1080 px

 

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